VirusTotal += Netcraft

Netcraft Toolbar is one of the most known antiphishing/antimalware browser toolbars out there. The Netcraft team describes its software as follows:

The Toolbar community is effectively a giant neighbourhood watch scheme, empowering the most alert and most expert members to defend everyone within the community against phishing attacks. Once the first recipients of a phishing mail have reported the target URL, it is blocked for community members as they subsequently access the URL. Widely disseminated attacks (people construct phishing attacks send literally millions of emails in the expectation that some will reach customers of the bank) simply mean that the phishing attack will be reported and blocked sooner.
The Netcraft Toolbar also:

• Traps suspicious URLs containing characters which have no common purpose other than to deceive.

• Enforces display of browser navigational controls (toolbar & address bar) in all windows, to defend against pop up windows which attempt to hide the navigational controls.

• Clearly displays sites' hosting location, including country, helping you to evaluate fraudulent urls (e.g. the real citibank.com or barclays.co.uk sites are unlikely to be hosted in the former Soviet Union).

Taking all of this into account we are really excited to announce that Netcraft has been integrated in VirusTotal, you will now see it as another URL scanner in VirusTotal's URL scanning service.

With this addition we have already over 30 URL scanners and are looking forward to be in the forties as soon as possible, so if you have an interesting malicious URL dataset or URL scanner please do not hesitate to contact us, we will be more than happy to include you!

Thank you Netcraft team!

Read More

VirusTotal URL scanner += Comodo Site Inspector

Today we are integrating Comodo Site Inspector in VirusTotal's URL scanning engine. We have reached 26 URL scanners/datasets and a bunch of domain classifiers/datasets. We intend to keep increasing this figure, thus, if you are the owner of a URL blacklisting service or dataset please do not hesitate to contact us.

As to Comodo Site Inspector, you can find more about it in its home page:

http://siteinspector.comodo.com/

Including the online scanning service itself and a list of recent detections. The Comodo team describes the service as follows:

SiteInspector uses browser instance in sandboxed environment ( a virtual machine) and browses the page at the URL that you submitted. If the browser performs a malicious activity, crashes, downloads a suspicious file, changes registry entries or exhibits behavior consistent with malware activity then its flagged as malicious. This allows regular Internet users to test the safety of a particular website and allows website operators to test the safety of their website from their customers point of view. 

SiteInspector acts as a vulnerable customer by visiting the page and testing whether it launches an attack. If it does, then the scan results will warn you that the website contains malicious content. Each scan takes only a few seconds.  

This description and other details can also be found in their FAQ.

We would like to give Comodo Site Inspector a really warm welcome and thank them for allowing us to keep improving VirusTotal!

Read More